People want to know you and that sort of feels like folk music, where you want to artist to be your friend. “I need space between me and the audience - and the more space the better. Still painfully shy, LaMontagne loves playing the gigantic, impersonal venues. This summer, LaMontagne will hit the road with David Grey for a 17-date American amphitheatre tour that launches August 15th in Columbia, Maryland. It bugs me that people think my songs are personal because it means I have to explain myself all the time.”
“They’re just songs - they have nothing to do with me,” he says.
Many of the tracks, like “This Love Is Over” and “New York Is Killing Me,” are written in the voice of a highly depressed narrator, but LaMontagne says they aren’t autobiographical. The finished LP is similar to his previous work - a unique blend of soul and folk. “Then I had stretches where I would just get a bridge or a verse and I would lay them out on a table and work on that song until it got dry.” “Some days I didn’t make any progress at all and I was horrible… just hellish,” he says. In the past, writing took nearly a year of procrastination, but this time he locked himself in a room for 14 hours a day and forced himself to write in a notebook. His wrote the songs this past January - again, completely reversing his standard process. The band never heard the songs until the day we cut them, but we always got two songs a day.” “Every morning we had breakfast at a place called Elmer’s in Ashfield and then drove a mile to the barn and stated working around 11:30 a.m. “We cut it in a giant old barn on my property in Massachusetts that was built in 1811,” LaMontagne says.
For his fourth album, God Willin’ & the Creek Don’t Rise (out August 17th), LaMontagne decided it was time for a major shake-up: he ditched Johns in favor of self-production and forced himself to record the album live over just five days. Making his first three albums was a lengthy process complicated by LaMontagne’s increasingly volatile relationship with his longtime producer Ethan Johns. Recording music has never been much fun for Ray LaMontagne.
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